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Finding your own hill.

As a cyclist (of sorts), I often use an app called ‘Strava’. This not only tracks your route, speed, altitude etc., but also lets you know how you are doing against your previous efforts (as well as other people).

Out for a cycle a couple of evenings ago, I tackled one of my favourite hills. ‘Personal Record’ gushed Strava enthusiastically after my ascent – this was apparently the quickest I had climbed this particular hill in the twenty or so times I had cycled up it. My satisfaction was short-lived. After a little investigation, the app informed me that I was the 1188th fastest person up this hill in the last five years or so. That must include a few races of super fit young guys though, surely? Not only that but I was only the 23rd fastest up it today! I then found similarly depressing figures for my gender, age-group and weight, suggesting I suppose that quite a lot of other middle aged slightly overweight men had done better than me.

The lesson here is not to get sucked in to measuring yourself against other people. For most of us, for any task or achievement, there will always be someone who has done better. We are each our unique mix of talents and abilities. I don’t suppose many of those people who climbed the hill quicker than me could design gardens very well or probably cook an omelette as well as I can (I do mean scrambled eggs as well). Try your hardest and do better than you did last time.

Curiously enough, businesses do much the same. They often spend far too much time comparing themselves against their competitors. “How did they get that contract?” “Why are they able to sell that more cheaply than we can?” Instead, we should concentrate on what our clients want. In the end, they are what drive the business. if we get that right, the competitors cease to matter. As business leaders, we should concentrate on serving our clients’ needs as best we can, along with fine-tuning our internal processes to make improvements to our performance. We should also be looking for new ways to delight them, perhaps even identifying needs that they didn’t know they had.